6mo ago

Old Folks Gaming: Senior Edition

Hey Guys.

After about ten years my father finally agreed to move to Linux. Because his devices I gifted him are not "supported for Windows 11".

And it is a blast - He loved Gnome for having his two games: Mahjong and Solitair.

Everything works flawlessly; He observed me updating Debian to trixie within an instant to get him his OneDrive back.

Anyhow: I would like to recommend some alternative Games he may like; Just to show off hisnnew operating system (of choice, yay).

If this isn't clear: He isn't gaming "Fullscreen". He chills for 30 Minutes with just his mice infront of the computer.

Any alternative to games would be appreciated as well.

Cheers

22 comments

The obvious answer is the other two casual classics: Space Cadet Pinball and Minesweeper. Possibly also some of the classic board games like Chess, or Go.
- Found that pinball Flatpak and it's nice to occasionally play. Hits you in the memories, if you aren't like me and actually play with sounds on.

I haven't played with vanilla Debian in forever, but if there's a good "Software Center" style overlay to the package manager, I bet he could find some good stuff on his own. The "Discover" app in Ubuntu actually categorizes the games by genre. Pingus, Minesweeper clones, Sokoban clones, Poker, Chess, Checkers, Go, Reversi.

Simon Tatham's Puzzles has classic puzzle games like MasterMind and Sudoku plus a bunch that became classics to me after I discovered them there.
About every year or so one of the ones I have previously ignored "clicks" for me and becomes a new favorite of mine.

Not 100% sure whether he'd like it or not, but HyperRouge. Can easily be played with just the mouse. At least that's how I play it since I cannot figure out how to move using keyboard.
There's the free version, which might be available in whatever default software repository is enabled, available through GitHub for compilation, can probably run the free windows version through wine or proton, or there's the Steam version if you wanna support the devs and/or like things like achievements or online leaderboards to track your progress.

For someone doing solitaire and mahjong, maybe try iagno (reversi), tetravex (tile layout puzzle), or minesweeper.

If he's looking for something social.... Consider Brighter Shores.
It's a modern table top styled MMO by Andrew Gower (the RuneScape guy). Just like RuneScape it's a point and click adventure MMO so ... it's really easy to pick up. It also works great as a windowed game, has low hardware requirements, and everything is saved server side so progress is pretty much impossible to lose.
It's got 2 free episodes (which is a lot of stuff to potentially do) and the optional subscription is currently $5.99/mo so it's also very affordable.
Linux is not natively supported but it runs great under Proton ... and the team seems very keen on making it work on as many platforms as possible.

OpenTyrian is fullscreen, but easy to play with mouse. The player steers a tiny spaceship and it shoots when you hold down the mouse button. You can pause any time with Esc and it has even game speed settings and easter eggs.

22 comments